Journal

Due to improved consciousness about environmental impacts associated with anthropogenic development activities, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) became a mandatory exercise for decision-making for a proposed development activity or a project/industry, which carryout as legal practice in more than 100 countries. The major limitation of the current EIA process is that EIA focuses on impacts associated with production/development activity in an area, not providing an impact assessment of the product after it is made and circulated. Various approaches and tools have been developed to overcome this limitation. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one approach and tool that achieved prominence as a tool to assess absolute environmental sustainability. Life cycle assessment gives a holistic impact assessment of a development activity/project/ industry or a product by factual analysis of the product's entire lifecycle in terms of sustainability. There are many LCA approaches such as cradle to gate, cradle to cradle, cradle to grave, gate to gate, and circular economy. LCA as a sustainability indicator and decision-making tool can be utilized for comparison of similar services/activities/designs/products, and also for improved product development, single issues such as carbon footprint or water footprint, product marketing by environmental product declaration or ecolabeling, compliance study for product-specific or sector-specific standards, strategic planning and policymaking, setting environmental regulation, long-term monitoring study, and identification of areas for improvement. More details are required, the completer and more comprehensive the LCA needs to be. Hence the LCA is no longer a manual exercise but done by various LCA software designed and developed for a specific purpose. Life cycle inventory data, life cycle impact assessment, and life cycle assessment software provide users with a vast database and impact assessment related to the proposed activity. The diversity of the software present can be overwhelming for users to decide among the software for LCA Study. This article provides an overview of the different LCA software available according to their features, similarities, differences, advantages, disadvantages, user-friendliness, and features specific to software, if any. The article also provides the feasibility of utilizing LCA for EIA in India.